Vampire in the Banyan Tree

Aleron and the Sorcerer in the Tower of the Hand

         'How shall I begin?' asked the sorcerer, to the bland-faced youth who stood before him. 'Perhaps with an introduction. But which name to give? I've had so many.'

The sorcerer paced about the chamber. A little sweat beaded on his forehead. He'd found the climate here dry, save for the humidity that came with the spring, when the edges of this specter-ridden country caught the expiring rains of the swampland. His head was bald, his body unnaturally hairless, thick-boned and porcine-obese. His features, once handsome, had become coarsened, crueled and debauched by long years of vice. He wore no visible ornamentation, save for his, slabbish hands, which were weighted with rings of plain iron, sat on beds of scar tissue, as if they had burned periodically red hot. Any practitioner of magic (the youth was not) would have instantly recognized this as a sign that the man was a powerful direct manipulator, who wore rings of conducting metal on their extremities to flash off the energy of an unbalanced field while performing their miraculous feats.

It was not a climate for heavy attire, and he was clothed in a black gown, of some uncanny material, finer than silk that hung from his heavy body and fell in long sleeves from his arms in an appropriately sorcerous fashion. Though the long isolation and fugitive wanderings in the reaches of the fifth continent, he'd never fallen into the decadent Mulplexian habit of nudity. Once he'd had a name written in golden ink, beneath letters of recommendation. He had worn a robe of a different color. Now, in barbarous exile, he walked barefoot, feeling the deep powers of the earth and drawing their tidal strength up through his feet like the monstrous Bolg.

They were in a wide, circular chamber, twenty strides across and high. The walls were smooth, without visible masonry, like the inside of a jug. Many years ago, earthquakes (the region suffered from them), or some wizardly squabble, had sheared off part of its western wall, creating a ragged gap, that framed the ochre and grey topography of the desert valley like a great window.

The valley was called Ukom Bur, The Secret Door. Its floor was flat and filled with sediment, marked only by sparse scrub and a dry river course that sketched a lazy, discursive track through its middle. Little in this lonely place remembered mankind. Centuries ago someone had built a wall across the narrowest section, but the desert had long ago turned it into lumps of impotent masonry, smoothed over by the dunes. However, rising in the revile's west was a low hill, surmounted by an ancient fortress that squatted between the stony thighs of the mountains. It had five round towers, like fingers, masoned in a barbarous style which, together, presented the appearance of a giant hand, held in warning to any wanderer straying from the eastern watches in some misguided idea of entering the barriers. Indeed, it was called, in the old days, Kaarill, The Warning. In these later times it was referred, (by those who even still knew of its existence), to by a more colloquial moniker, The Tower of The Hand, a thing of sinister reputation, long abandoned.

They stood in the upper chamber of the most southern tower, the thumb. Rising like the others from the mass of the ruined fortress, its girth broadened into a phallic bulb of smooth stone, cresting to a point. A muttering, snarling crowd of dwarfish creatures lounged in their shadows, armed with crude- hooked blades and rough clubs. Their master called them 'Gulimps', for no particular reason, other than they needed a name and it suited them. They were degenerate chimera, nonesuch creatures, vat-grown puppets. Some had the heads of swine or were feathered like birds, others horn-skinned and squat, with toadish golden eyes. They were stupid, the disordered mechanisms of their unnaturally wired brains in similar mismatch as their limbs, but they could understand simple instructions and were strong and hard to kill.

To the youth's left, outside the circle of his pacing captor, stood the chamber's only decoration, a great, green-glass mirror, bound about its edges with coiling snakes of carved jade, a forgotten vanity of some sorcerer queen, perhaps, unearthed from the desert. It's reflection showed nothing but an indistinct pearlecence, as if it were standing in a region of mist and fog instead of the sunlit room.

Apart from this, and its inhabitants, the room was empty.

The sorcerer continued his slow circuit, lingering over each feature of his prisoner like a man examining an expensive new purchase. He continued to speak as if musing aloud. His voice was accentless, crude in its words, oddly cultured in it's cadence.

         'They say you can judge a man by his enemies' he continued. 'I don't like to brag, but I have the best. And you have me, of course, which speaks well of you. Excellence breeds jealousy, and there are those who do not posses a sense of humor. A man of low popularity may occasionally have to change his name or his address to evade his detractors, I have to change entire continents. These days, even that is scarcely enough. But you may call me 'Blackheel' for now. An alias by which I have reintroduced myself to these parts after a long absence. Your family and I have a history. I performed a great service to your grandfather's kingdom, for which I asked no reward and got exactly that. He knew me by a different name, which was also my first.' The sorcerer had completed his circuit and now stood again in front of the boy. 'But we'll come back to that later.'

The blank-faced youth could not have presented a greater contrast. He was blond, maybe eighteen years old, strong and straight-limbed, hands calloused from weapon hilts and martial practice but otherwise unmarked. His face was almost parodically handsome, as if carved by some sardonic god in mockery of the questing hero. He was clad in the curt leather armor of a plains cavalryman, worn and dusted by hard use, hacked here and there as if it had defected sword blows. Although he appeared an aberrantly wholesome manifestation of the illustrious line of inbreds, drunks and occasional devil-worshipers that comprised the royal house of Sabertine-Wettling, the Sorcerer knew the youth's name and knew he was no plainsman.

         'Can you hear me, guest?'

The boy answered, his voice unflavored by emotion. 'Yes.'

         'Good. Then listen. I have stolen your will, through a forbidden mesmerism called the Slaver's Exscriptural. This magic, like most of its kind, is a sort of slow seduction. Though it penetrates to the psychological core of its target, only the victim himself can open his mind to it and, even to the very end, needs only a moment of wisdom, a turning away from greed and folly, to escape its thrall. Such qualities you conspicuously failed to demonstrate. Ask me what that means.'

         'What does that mean?'

         'You have no personal volition or will. I can command you to forget, I can command you to remember. I can command you to tell me anything. Perhaps I already have. In your present state, I could order you to take a knife and carve out your own intestines. Are you afraid?'

         'No.'

         'Of course not, empty vessel. Do you know who I am?'

         'No.'

         'You shouldn't find it difficult to guess. It was I who planted the trails that lead you here. It was I that dripped honey into willing ears, relying on your insecurities, your dreams of power and acclaim.' He paused his pacing, as if in momentary thought.

         'I command you to forget that,' he said.

         'I have forgotten,' intoned the youth.

         'Good. Now, upon the sound of my hands I command you to regain all emotions, memory and power of independent thought, but no control, yet, of your body below the neck.'

The sorcerer clapped his hands sharply. Instantly the youth's face blazed with suddenly released fury, distorting into a snarl so fierce that the magician felt himself laughing at the impulse to step back from it.

The prisoner gave forth to a torrent of abuse. 'YOU WHORE'S CUNT!' the boy yelled, 'Sodomist, sorcerer, syphilitic degenerate, faithless, dammed and accursed! Coward!' The sudden animation of his features notwithstanding, he remained immobile, neck cording as if against invisible chains, but his body impotent, still and severed from his will to action.

Roused by this outburst, the rabble of half-creatures that lounged in the shadows of the chamber's walls hissed and jeered, lolling their forked tongues and scraping their crude blades against the floor.

         'Nice talk from a member of the aristocracy,' reproved the magician,' if I did not trust to your upbringing, I might believe you liable to assault me.'

         'I will kill you' ground out the other, forcing as much passion into the words as he was able.

The magician pointed sternly to his misshaped slaves. 'My guest has undertaken to kill me,' he said, 'I instruct you not to interfere.' He turned back. 'Have you guessed my real name? Would you like a hint? I know yours. Aleron Utbeth Sabertine-Wettling. Prince of Uliginose, otherwise known as the Swampland Kingdom.' The blond youth in the dusty armor remained silent, staring murder daggers at his captor. The other continued. 'Do you know were you are?'

         'Yes,' ground out the youth, 'I'm not an idiot.'

         'I haven't seen much evidence to support that assertion.'

         'I may supply it.'

         'Far be it for me to call that bravado.'

         'What do you want?'

         'That may become eventually apparent, to the deductive powers of a non-idiot such as yourself.' He pointed a finger at the great oval shimmering glass.

         'This is the Mirror of Zechiahada. I won't thrill you with the details of how I stole it, and from whom. It has many strange properties. A natural mirror will return only the image of yourself. This one looks deeper. You have seen its subtle luminescences before, have you not, prince? Ah yes, turning in the waters of that cavern below the earth.. For myself, I have never had the nerve to look so deeply. But courage is the prerogative of heroes.'

Despite himself, Aleron glanced at the pearlescent surface in loathing fascination. It was a mistake. In that instant, the device's weird magnetism took effect, seizing his gaze and holding it. The oval perimeter began to expand, as if the thing were drawing closer, but its heavy frame did not move from its place. With a sudden, panicked effort, he tried to wrench his eyes away from it but couldn't.
Without moving he seemed to drift past the vaporous serpentines of the mirror's edges. The mist began to clear, swirling in a languorous vortex from its centre and became sunlight. He saw a small, high-walled garden, completely familiar to him, and yet distorted, as if by the uneven recollections of dream memory, as if the mirror was drawing from his own mind. Some details were sharp, others fell away into abstraction, not blurred, but undetailed, as if left a suggestion of the canvass by some talented painter. The high-walled garden was overgrown and peaceful. Amongst the leaves and flowers, tiny white-winged butterflies foraged, living motes that seeming to have some sort of spectral vitality, celebrant vessels dancing in the presence of the living. There was a fountain, water was falling into a round pool from the phallus of a copper-green statue, a satyr. The creature's face was without detail, but its eyes were black holes cut into the metal, round as pennies.

Seated by this pool was the figure of a young woman, illuminated in the shaft of sun that fell from the unseen ridge of the wall. She glowed in the cool shadows of the greenery, as if in a living picture frame. She was beautiful as a lover's promise, golden as the day. Straight-limbed as Aleron was, blond, as Aleron was too, her hair fell straight as a waterfall, swept back from her face to hang to the small of her back. She was clad in a simple, white dress that left her arms bare, like a sacrifice. She was without jewellery but there could be few women who needed them less.

Two prodigious natural ornaments, however, she did have, that the humble white shift did little to conceal. These, seemingly unburdened by their own weight, rather rose almost magically against gravity in sublime curvatures as shapely as temple domes, to pointed promontories almost a foot from her chest. From their tips, the white cloth of her shift descended in delicate draperies, forming a shallow tent that curved back to gather at folds in her lap. On most women such monuments would seem like caricatures, but held, in effortless counterpoint to her clean limbs, the graceful narrowing of her waist to womanly hips, each physical curvature, although exaggerated in itself, was harmonious in the whole. It was as if some sublime artist had described, with a few, expert strokes, a paragon, depicting, in innocent lust and reverence, the fertile goddess of spring.

In this world of varying resolution, she was sharp. Each hair in her halo was delineated with a golden gleam as fine as a light along spider silk. The subtle pulse that beat in her throat could be seen, the edges of her nails, her eyelashes, even small imperfections like the scuffs along the heel of her feet from walking in the garden bricks, all of her was present in perfect clarity.

Her hands were gathered in her lap. Her feet crossed on each other. She sat staring into the empty garden. As the mirror's sorcerous eye approached, her head turned alertly, as if at some footfall, but the summer-blue eyes did not shift to track it's source.

         'Ahh,' came the sorcerer's voice, with a sort of predatory satisfaction. Aleron felt his soul shrivel like a slug in salt. He occupied a body that was himself and not himself, a perspective both of the violator and impotent witness. It was himself standing in the golden circle of light in the green garden with the blind, beautiful girl, and yet himself that looked from that body's eyes, of his form and not, perpetrator and spectator.

With a brutal motion, he grasped the delicate gauze of her white shift and ripped it wide, exposing her prodigious endowments. Silently her face made a shocked O, a squeal of unheard terror, another yank stripped her of her modestly entirely. She twisted helplessly against his warrior-hard arms, slapping and fighting to break free, he tripped and roughly shoved, so that she went sprawling, face-first, across the divan, her heavy, pale breast swinging like pendulums, her golden hair coming apart into gem-sparkle disarray.

         'Vile boy!' gloated the sorcerer's voice, 'Shameful are the desires languish in the dungeons of the mind. But the mirror has no mercy.'

         'By the blessed saints, who live forever-' groaned he youth, his mind flexing impotently against invisible chains. He felt tears stinging his eyes, but it wasn't with his physical senses he witnessed this scene, or felt it. Craning over her alabaster shoulder, her tear stained face, her perfect lips imploring unheard words, seeing nothing in his own but untempered lust. In the wavering vision the mirror self hog-tied the struggling voluptuous, limbs across the bench with strips of her own torn gown, pulling apart the smooth-muscled thighs and binding them, spread-eagled, by the ankle, to the legs of the garden bench, to form a living altar. With a single pull -

***

         'That's enough!' protested the girl, points of color standing out on her cheeks.

         'Of what?' asked the vampire, from its perch amongst the branches.

         'Is this really necessary?'

         'I'm pretty sure your interruptions aren't.'

         'I get it, in the vision of the enchanted mirror he's.. doing things. To the woman. You don't have to go into such repulsive detail. Move on!'

         'Are you the story-teller here? No? Then kindly allow me to render the scene in such detail as to properly capture the drama. Anyway: with a single pull of the drawstring, his own breeches fell down about his ankles. For an instant, the proud lance of his virility poised for its predatory thrust, before plunging between the-'

         'Come on!'

         '- shapely hillocks-'

         'I'm going to put my fingers in my ears!' she yelled.

         'Bah!' huffed the vampire. 'Fine.'

         'Who is the woman in the mirror?'

         'Shut up and maybe you'll find out! Anyway-'

***

The uneven luster of the vision seemed to give the plunging figures a sumptuous, barbaric gloss. Distorted, the features of the two seemed twisted into a bestial lust beyond the attainment of mortal coupling. The unnatural prescience bled into itself, diffusing into abstraction. 'No..' wept the youth, but his eyes remained locked to the violating shapes until suddenly he was in his own immobilized body again, in the tower chamber, conscious of the impersonal muscles of his body, unmoved by the torment of his mind and the uncomfortable pressure of his unwanted erection. His body was beaded with sweat.

         'Merely phantasms of your own obsessions,' purred Blackheel, passing his be-ringed hand across his eyes as if dispelling a vision. The bestial onlookers darted glances back and forward between them, growling and licking their misshapen lips, perhaps confused in their muddy minds as to why the prisoner cried out as if tortured when their master had yet put no hand upon him.

         'The mirror opens a symbolic portal,' smiled his captor, 'but the viewer sends it where he wants to go.'

         'What do you want with me?' asked Aleron, this time unable to hide his trepidation.

         'I'm going to assure that you will never sit on the throne of the Swampland Kingdom.'

         'Are you going to murder me? Then do it, coward!'

         'Oh I don't kill. I leave that to my moral betters. A little rule I made, many years ago.'

         'Then what?' demanded Aleron.

The sorcerer laughed. 'As you know, the illustrious aristocracy of your storied realm have placed upon your throne, at one point or another, every species of illiterate drunkard, cattle-humping simpleton, pederast, wife-decapitator, cannibal-'

         'Bastard!'

         '-kin-killer, moon-struck lunatic, inbred and cripple known to man. Belleron the Truncated was blind and had no arms or legs-'

         'I never heard of him!'

         '-Flevoux the Fashionable broke out in boils when exposed to sunlight-'

         'That freak was not related to my family and as a matter of fact it was my great grand uncle who murdered him!'

         'Gergerotz was missing an arm, Pethrem was missing his ears. Golggoth the Sedentary was so infected with blight that they kept him in a pot and watered him like a plant. But there's one thing that will disqualify you for good, one deformity, one wound, your fine countrymen won't tolerate on the Sacred Oak.'

Aleron said nothing, unnerved. He had no idea what this injury could be, but if it made him worse off than Belleron the Truncated he wasn't looking forward to finding out.

Riding from the Gate of the city of his father, in the early light, with the countryside wreathed in mist and wood smoke, Aleron had often passed rebels or convicted men squatting in chains along the line of the road, their heads bloody from their freshly-cropped ears. However ragged and abject those prisoners were, they were at least allowed control of their own minds. This is why people hate magicians he thought, but despairingly, realizing, at last, the folly that had handed this demon such control, not only over his body, which was bad enough, but his inner self, the impetuous need that had caused him to first stare into the mists of the mirror, (although he had not known at the time that that was what they were), seeking the thing he craved above all others.

Aleron's feverish thoughts turned on themselves like trapped rats, to the months preceding his present predicament, to the the path that that led him here. God of gods, how did it come to this?